THE CRITICS POSTSCRIPT PAULINE KAEL Loving the movies. BY DAVID DENBY S he seemed constantly in motion, and constantly talking and laugh- ing, too, saying so much that one was amazed by how much she also heard. At a screening, she reacted audibly to many things in the movie, sighing with amazement or dismay, sometimes pan- icking nearby moviegoers with a loudly muttered joke that disrupted the air like a plate crashing to the floor. Pauline Kael, who died last week at the age of eighty-two, in the house she loved, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, struck many people as one of the most brilliantly and scandalously alive hu- man beings they had ever met. She re- sponded to everything she saw and felt-registering a soft breeze coming off the water or a curious-looking dog in the park, along with movies and books and people-and her responses were immediate, fearless, paralyzingly funny, and rarely altered or withdrawn. The many-sidedness of her attention fuelled her sense of movies as an all- encompassing art form, imperial in its range and its ability to absorb. She hated to see movies pinned down by theory to an essential nature-defined as purely visual or purely anything else. Movies were radically impure, that was the point; they incorporated many of the older arts, photography, painting, theatre, and the novel, and they re- quired criticism alert to the spontane- ous moment as well as to form, to an actor's fleeting expression as well as to a director's grand design. In general, she was loath to speak of 158 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 1"7, 2001 a movie thematically until she had es- tablished some flesh on the screen-a face, an image, a bit of color or move- ment, a sensuous or absurd detail that, connected to many other such details, embodied a judgment that breathed with anger and amusement. In print, as in person, she was insistent, rude, loving, and bawdy; always funny, often perverse, even perversely commonsen- sical. She enjoyed shocking the most important person in the room. She had a temperament resolutely opposed to forming any opinion by category or by aesthetic level. The old distinction be- tween high and low, for instance, didn't much matter to her, for in movies, she was sure, art might not look like art, or, at least, like what people had been taught to respect as art-something formally composed, balanced, elegant. Movie art might be rough and raw, even messy. She preferred vitality to refinement; the irregular and jagged to the well proportioned; the aggressive, lunging uproar of American pop to the contained austerity of certain kinds of European art. The young Euro- peans she loved-the lusciously sen- sual Bertolucci of "The Conformist" and the word-happy and graphically dazzling Godard-were prized for their audacity. "An intellecmal who is not afraid of sensation," Robert B rustein called her. People who thought of her as a specialist in pop could be surprised at how much she knew, surprised by an acute and detailed appreciation of Henry James or an expert aside about nineteenth-century French painting. Born in Northern California, she was educated at Berkeley in the late thir- ties, and, while running movie revival houses there in the fifties and broad- casting on radio, she wrote not only for film magazines but for Partisan Review and, later, for McCall's, Life, and The New Republic. In some cases, her instinctive disdain for the received wisdom of the house (she panned "The Sound of Music" at McCall's and Antonioni's "Blow-Up" at The New Republic) led to a quick depar- mre. Much of this combative and rau- cously funny work was gathered in the wide-ranging collections "I Lost It at the Movies" (published in 1965 and best-seller) and "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" (1968). When she joined this maga- zine, in 1968, she enjoyed for the first time in her life, at the age of forty- eight, the luxury of writing regu- larly and at length, and she published a long piece every week for six months at a stretch (in alternating periods with Penelope Gilliatt). Her work here continued, with one break, until 1991. In both abundanèe and quality, it was a performance very likely with- out equal in the history of American journalism. P auline arrived at the magazine at a challenging moment. The Viet- nam War, and the social turmoil that arose in response to it, had produced a new critical and exploratory tone, a new moral realism in commer- cial American movies. It was a time for great popular art, nd she became, quite consciously, the herald of a golden age, celebtating the early work of Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Paul Mazursky, Robert Altman, Brian g De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Frederick Wiseman, and many others. She re- viewed, in the nineteen-seventies and Ll.J eighties, the first two "Godfather" æ movies, "Close Encounters of the 8 Third Kind" and "E.T. The Extra- T . al "" " d " N hvill "w errestrl , M* A*S*H an as e, " M S " d " T . D . " >- ean treets an axl rIver, "Dressed to Kill" and "Blow Out." 8 These movies were very different in - spirit from the movies she had grown up with and loved in the nineteen- thirties-the wise-cracking comedies <